Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant

But it's inexhaustible. Sun will die at some point and moon will fall down to earth. Then we'll have no solar and no waves.

Nuclear is quite exhaustible. If we use it to power everything, we have about 100 years worth. It's just another kind of fossil fuel, storing energy that was captured long ago.

I love that you can post whatever you want on the internet. “Nuclear is quite exhaustible”, “The earth is flat”, “Ernest Borgnine killed JFK” you can just put words together and put them online. Such a thrill

Do you believe that underground elves are continuously manufacturing more uranium, or what do you believe is the case?

According to some quick googling and rough math, there's about 5.5 billion years worth of U-235 present in the Earth's crust on the top 15km. If we consider that we can maybe reach 0.5km down, (deepest gold mine is 4km), and assuming it's evenly distributed, then that's only 180 million years!! (2024 global electricity usage)

Think we can figure out breeder reactors in 180 million years? If we're going all nuclear, I'd expect them in under 1,000 years, but I'm not an expert.

I’m just having fun posting online as an expert on nuclear energy that’s never heard of fusion, breeder reactors or thorium it is a blast because you can just write numbers. 100 100,000 100,000,000 are all the same to me

No but technology improves. Breeder reactors can take the current fissile material (assuming estimates of the total fissile material are accurate, which isn’t necessarily accurate) and extend it by about 60x, meaning thousands of years or even closer to tens of thousands of years. And we don’t need it to last forever. Just long enough to get to fusion.

The question is whether current nuclear power can be considered renewable. The answer is that it is not.

Renewable, to my mind, means energy that will be there in a million years. Solar. Wind. Waves. That kind of thing.

Exactly. Nuclear power is not eternal because uranium is finite whereas solar will last forever because the aluminium, cadmium, copper, gallium, indium, lead, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, silver, selenium, tellurium, tin and zinc to make the panels exist in infinite quantities

If we can extract minerals from the Earth then we can extract them from PV panels to refurbish/build new PV panels.

If you don't like that, then there's also concentrated solar. We're not going to run out of mirrors.

Fissile isotopes on the other hand, once they're gone, they're gone. You can build new reactors that run on different fuel but that's not the same thing as you were doing before, so you can't call the original process renewable.

Idk why this is downvoted. People should look it up before you thinking someone isn't contributing to the conversation

> The European Commission said in 2001 that at the current level of uranium consumption, known uranium resources would last 42 years. When added to military and secondary sources, the resources could be stretched to 72 years. Yet this rate of usage assumes that nuclear power continues to provide only a fraction of the world's energy supply.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining

Or depends also on what we're willing to pay for the power but critics already call it too expensive compared to be viable given renewables' price and price history

The estimate is outdated but I didn't quickly find newer info and it's just generally not a weird notion to say it's exhaustible

Imo we should make use of what we have and not wait for everyone to put solar on their roofs to supply like 10% of what we need and then wonder how else we're going to reach net zero (especially in local winter), but that's another discussion

Fusion will be the permanent end of all known life in the universe, as we compete with each other to boil the most ocean to make more bitcoins, leading to a planet with a helium atmosphere and no water.

Bro what the fuck are you talking about. This comment is incomprehensible.

I think those numbers unfairly assume many things, including:

- breeder reactors will not exist in time

- we will not find more uranium on Earth than we have already

- we will not be able to economically extract uranium from seawater, phosphate minerals, coal fly ash or other sources

- other materials besides uranium will not be used in the future

- synthetic production will not become viable

To say that nothing will change in the next 40-70 years and we will simply run out of material and stop using nuclear altogether, just seems quite far-fetched in my opinion.

"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."

So what you’re saying is that there is more than enough nuclear fuel to power humanity through its entire existence

There are ~65 Trillion tons of uranium in Earth's crust. This dissolves into sea water to maintain an equilibrium concentration.

It takes 18.6 tons of natural uranium to produce 1 TWh of electricity with light water reactors.

The world consumes ~30,000 TWh each year.

65 Trillion / (18.6 * 30,000) = 1x10^8 years worth of uranium with present day technology, no elves required.